Activism

“Rape is like a football game, Annie,” a UNC administrator allegedly told a student filing a rape report years ago. “If you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback and you’re in charge, is there anything that you would have done differently in that situation?”
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“There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves,” Toni Morrison once said, explaining why she wrote Beloved, in an observation that inspired the Bench by the Road Project, which creates small memorials to African-American history. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or better still on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist… the book had to.”

Decades after Morrison’s call and nine years after the founding of the Bench by the Road Project, a large museum commemorating the horrible realities of slavery has finally been built. Its origin story is fascinating and bizarre.
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Harassment of women who share their opinions online are so common, pervasive, and frightening that it’s practically irresponsible to talk about “infighting” on the left, particularly around identity politics issues, without understanding that broader context. This morning, Michelle Goldberg published a painful but important piece in the Washington Post about the way Gamergate-style threats and harassment have chased many prominent feminist bloggers out of the public sphere, or at least made them consider quitting. The reporting-heavy piece describes a sort of PTSD that being heavily trolled inflicts on writers, sometimes until they leave the Internet.
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In the decade since I left my large, co-ed university, I’ve grown envious of the women I’ve encountered who matriculated at traditional women’s colleges. Far from the tea-sipping institution that my mother attended — and hated — in the ’60s, many of these “single-sex” institutions have boomeranged back towards a progressive purpose. To me, they have seemed like feminist incubators of “strong [insert school here]” graduates who mentor each other, get each other jobs, and emerge into the world unafraid.
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